“Good. Hope he suffers, but keep him alive. I might yet have a use for the murdering scumbag.”
“The doc’s on her way. Should be here inside the hour.”
Lara’s on her way? Here?
“No, tell her to stay away. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want her anywhere near this place. You hear me!”
“We tried stopping her. Corky did, too. But you know the doc.”
“Corky?”
Damn it. He’d almost forgotten about him. How was that possible?
Cough nodded again. “He told me you’d powered off your earwig. Didn’t want to disturb you, so he’s been keeping me in the loop instead. You’ll be off after Vadik, I suppose?”
“No point. He’s long gone by now. But we’ll catch up with him soon enough. We know where he’s heading.”
“No, sir. That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Sorry?”
“Vadik didn’t get far. Only a couple of miles.”
Kaine’s heart leapt as he read the excitement in Cough’s eyes.
“Explain yourself, Sergeant,” he asked, getting down to business.
“He’s the useless arsehole that was driving the fuck-off big BMW that nearly sideswiped us on the way in here. Driving like a madman, he was. All over the fucking road. I asked Corky to see if he could find him. There’s only one road out of here for five miles. Like I said, sir. He didn’t get far. Couple of miles away he took a corner too fast in the rain. Totalled his BMW.”
“Corky has eyes on the car? There’s a surveillance camera this far out in the sticks?”
Cough’s thin smile carried no mirth. “No sir. He’s monitoring the emergency services radio channels. Five minutes ago, Vadik called for an ambulance. Poor man’s screaming for help. Says he’s trapped in his car. The paramedics aren’t likely to reach him for another thirty minutes, though. Off you go, sir. Stinko and I’ve got this place covered.”
Kaine suppressed a whoop. He clapped Cough’s good shoulder and took off, sprinting around the side of the house to the burned-out fire pit the rear courtyard had become. The blackened, scorched woodwork made the place look as though a bushfire had roared through the area. Fortunately, the rain had doused the flames and prevented another flare-up.
He found the Triumph lying on its side, but otherwise undamaged. It had been protected from the propane explosion by the garage’s brick wall. The helmet still hung from the handlebar where he’d left it.
Kaine heaved the bike upright, confirmed his Sig was de-cocked and tucked safely into the inner pocket of his leather jacket, and straddled the seat. He grabbed the skid lid, turned it the right way up to allow the gathered rainwater to dribble out, and pulled it over his head, letting the strap dangle. He keyed the ignition and waited for the electronics to scroll through the start-up sequence. The bike caught first time, and Kaine raced around to the front, counteracting the rear wheel skid as the big bike fought the gravel for traction.
Demonstrating his usual forethought, Cough had made it to the gates and yanked one fully open, allowing Kaine a straight run through.
Kaine slowed the bike enough to yell, “Back soon,” and check for traffic before pulling onto the empty road. He opened the throttle and the powerful Triumph sprang forwards.
The rain stopped as quickly as it had started—as though someone upstairs wanted to make Kaine’s job easier—and the bike handled the waterlogged road and its weather-damaged surface well. The powerful beast had been designed with such conditions in mind.
Kaine didn’t push the bike beyond its limits, didn’t need to. He still had plenty of time before the first responders were due.
Less than two miles into the ride, he eased back on the throttle to negotiate a sharp right-hander with a flooded outside lane. He slowed further as he passed the apex and found the expected break in the hedgerow where a wide-bodied vehicle had left the road and ploughed through the dense bushes. It had probably aquaplaned on the deep puddle.
Kaine worked the hand and foot brakes together, rolled the Triumph to a gentle stop, and kicked out the prop stand. He leaned the bike over and dismounted. After tugging off the helmet and hanging it on the handlebars, he combed his gloved fingers through his sopping hair and took a leisurely stroll to the verge.
In the field three metres below the road, the dark blue BMW X5 rested on its passenger side, the motor still purring on fast idle. For the German engine to keep working after such a heavy shunt stood as proof of the manufacturer’s impressive build quality.
Raindrops fell from overhanging leaves and burst into steam as they hit the vehicle’s piping hot exhaust.
Apart from the cracked windscreen, which had popped out of its housing and lay beside the bonnet, the SUV didn’t show that much damage. In fact, it seemed pretty much intact from where Kaine stood, looking down. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find the vehicle still driveable once it had been set back on all four wheels.
Inside the cab, driver’s side, a man coughed.
“Hello?” Vadik called. “Is anyone there?”
Kaine grabbed hold of branches to prevent himself pitching headlong into the mess, and sideslipped down the muddy, damaged bank.
“Hello?” Vadik yelled again. “I am trapped. Help me!”
Kaine reached the flat part of the field, removed his right glove, and tucked it into a pocket. He pulled out the Sig, racked the slide, and worked his way through the boggy ground to the front of the SUV. Finally, the Beemer’s engine coughed and died. Kaine paused and took a moment to absorb the tranquillity.
Birds twittered in the treetops, welcoming the sun’s return. Rain glistened on foliage and turned cobwebs into decorated chandeliers. Some forty-odd metres away, in the bottom corner of the field, cows grazed on lush grass, oblivious to the nearby destruction. England could be such a strikingly beautiful place. Danny would have enjoyed the scene.
Danny!
Temporarily, Kaine shook his mind free of the dreadful loss of a close friend and stood back to examine the SUV. A buckled grill and a crumpled front nearside wing showed what happened when a tonne of careering metalwork met a hedge and destroyed at least one sapling.
“Why are you just standing there? Help me, damn you!”
Kaine ignored Vadik’s demand and continued his scan. Vadik hadn’t been the only one in the BMW when it crashed through the hedgerow. Unfortunately, the man in the passenger seat wouldn’t be taxing the skills of the approaching paramedics. In fact, he wouldn’t be taking up the time of anyone but the Coroner’s people.
The remains of the front passenger demonstrated the dangers of not wearing a seatbelt, and explained the reason for the windscreen’s dislocation. Photos of the crash might prove useful as aversion therapy. The car’s impact with the hedge and the instant reduction in forward momentum had thrown the fair-haired man through the windscreen. The passenger’s airbag hadn’t deployed in time to save him.
When human skull meets toughened and laminated glass at any significant velocity, neither material is likely to survive unscathed, but the skull will always suffer the greater damage. The passenger’s torso and arms dangled through the opening. The top of his head had been crushed on impact. Blood seeped and dripped from the wound, forming a wide pool on the mud and grass below. Bits of white brain matter floated in the puddle like the solid parts of a cauliflower soup. Pieces of skull, still attached to the dome by scalp which acted as hinges, flapped in the gentlest of breezes.
Kaine sneered. With Danny lying dead at the farm, he didn’t give a rat’s arse for the passenger, or the bellyaching driver.
“Help me, fuck you!”
The driver’s airbag had done its job, saving Vadik from serious injury. His seatbelt held him in place and he dangled sideways, leaning towards his dead associate. Although evidently unharmed, he didn’t look particularly comfortable. He struggled, wriggled, slammed his fists into the steering wheel, but couldn’t free himself from his restraint.
“Hi there, Vadik.
Thanks for hanging around.” Kaine smiled—at least Danny would have appreciated the humour. “You’ve just saved me no end of time.”
“You know me?”
“Yes, Vadik Pataki. How’d you guess?”
“I-I ….”
“I recognised you as the coward hiding behind the tree at Prentiss House.”
Pataki’s eyes bugged. He stopped struggling and grabbed the steering wheel so tight with both hands, the skin around his knuckles bleached white and the steering column screeched.
“Who … who are you?”
Kaine smiled, raised his weapon, and strode towards one of the men ultimately responsible for Danny’s death. He leaned over the partially decapitated corpse and jammed the Sig’s muzzle into Vadik’s forehead so hard, his head jerked back against the seat’s headrest.
Kaine pressed even harder. Vadik winced.
“We’ve never met,” Kaine said, surprised at how calm he sounded, “but I’m the man who’s going to end your days.”
Vadik whimpered. “No! Please!” He peeled one hand from the steering wheel and held it up in surrender. “Please don’t!”
“Begging? You’re begging for your life? Robbie Prentiss didn’t beg for his life. He didn’t have time. You sneaked up behind him and blew his brains out.”
Pataki’s eyes widened even further.
Slowly, Kaine slid his index finger through the Sig’s guard and curled it around the trigger. A gram or two of added pressure and it would be over.
“Money? Y-You want money?” Pataki screamed. “How much? One million euros?”
Kaine didn’t respond, didn’t react.
“Two! Two million euros. Cash money. You will be rich.”
“I don’t need your money.”
“How much can I give you? How much do you want!” Tears bled from the dark eyes.
“You killed Robert Prentiss and Danny.”
Droplets of sweat popped out on Vadik’s forehead. They formed rivulets that ran down his face and dripped from the tip of his nose and the point of his chin. Heat radiated from him and he trembled. Here was a man with a fever who knew that death stood close by.
“Danny? Who is Danny?”
Kaine peeled back his upper lip. “You never knew Danny,” he snarled. “But Danny was my friend, and you killed him. No amount of money’s going to bring him back.”
He rammed the Sig harder against Vadik’s forehead. The condemned man whimpered.
“Y-You killed my half-brother, Lajos. We are even. Please, please do not kill me.”
Kaine eased some weight off the Sig.
“Lajos is still alive, Vadik. At least for now. He says you planned it all. He claims he tried to talk you out of killing Robbie Prentiss and his wife.”
“N-No, no! That is not true.” Pataki shook his head, grimacing under the pressure of the Sig’s muzzle. “That is a lie. Lajos and Papa planned the whole thing. I was forced into it. Papa runs the family with a rod of … rod of …” The light in Pataki’s eyes changed. Fear turned to cunning. “Kill me and my papa, Viktor Pataki, will never rest. He will hunt you down and kill you and all your family and all your friends.”
“In that case,” Kaine said, tilting his head to one side as though considering his options, “I’d better go talk to him, eh? See if we can’t come to some sort of an understanding.”
Kaine smiled. He pulled the Sig away, de-cocked it, and slid it into his jacket pocket. Almost as an afterthought, he took the glove from the other pocket and tugged it over his sweating hand.
“That is right, Englishman,” Pataki crowed, rubbing the mark of the muzzle from his forehead, which suited Kaine well enough. “You go to see Papa. Negotiate for your life, gyáva. If you spare me, he will let you live. That is his way.”
“Who said anything about sparing you?”
“What? What did you say?”
“No, Vadik. I never said you were going to live. With Lajos alive, I already have a half-decent bargaining chip. A half-brother bargaining ship, if you like. Truth is, Vadik Pataki, I don’t need you at all, and neither does the world.”
Vadik released his hold on steering wheel and pushed his hands through the hole where the windscreen used to be, waving them in surrender.
“What? No, no! Papa is the Giant of Győr. He will kill you!”
Kaine confirmed his footing, and gave Vadik Pataki a grim smile.
“He can try, Vadik. Plenty of others have.”
Kaine batted aside Vadik’s arms and reached both hands through the opening. He grabbed Vadik by the chin and the back of the head and wrenched, hard and fast.
The wet squelch of snapping vertebrae—the sound of a drumstick being torn from a roast chicken—ended Vadik Pataki’s screams as instantly as it ended his life.
When the police finally arrived, a bullet in Vadik’s head would hardly encourage them to write the scene off as an unfortunate and tragic accident. On top of everything else, the piece of filth wasn’t worth the price of a bullet.
The cops would probably wonder how a man with a broken neck had managed to phone for an ambulance, but it wasn’t Kaine’s responsibility to answer the police’s questions or help them clear up their investigations.
He stepped back to give the crash scene a final once over.
A metallic glint at the side of the passenger caught his attention. He drew closer and pulled the flap of a jacket aside and discovered a rectangular box of electronics the size of a 1980s mobile phone. He had no idea what it was, but knew a little man who’d be able to determine its function. The unmarked box of tricks might have been responsible for the breakdown in their comms system. Kaine made sure the device was powered down and set it to one side while he searched the BMW’s cabin and the pockets of both corpses as best he could. Not the easiest of tasks while wearing leather bike gloves.
In the end, he found a tablet computer with a cracked screen and two top-of-the-range smartphones. Added to the 1980s mobile, they made a nice little haul and might well come in handy for the next phase of Kaine’s rapidly developing plan for vengeance.
He stood back from the SUV, raised his mobile, and took a picture of the scene. Something told him it might come in handy with future negotiations. He turned away and began the short climb to the waiting Triumph, making no attempt to obscure his footprints—it wasn’t necessary. A light rain had started up again and a fast-running micro-stream had formed where he’d trampled the undergrowth. By the time the first responders arrived, the water would have wiped away all trace of him.
Astride the Triumph once again he looked down at the wreckage. One third of the Pataki clan lay dead. Two more remained alive, but how long would he allow that to remain the status quo?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Wednesday 3rd May – Afternoon
Amber Valley, Derbyshire, UK
Danny’s dead. Oh Jesus, he’s dead.
The ride back to the Prentiss House gave Kaine time to think, and the enormity of the loss slowly sank in. Danny, the smiling, eager kid he’d first met in a Munich bar nearly eight years earlier—the kid who’d turned into a thoroughly decent and reliable friend—was gone.
Again, Kaine had to fight back the tears. Blurred vision did nothing to help him keep the bike on the road, and he cracked open the visor to allow fresh, clean air to cool his cheeks and dry his eyes.
Danny’s dead!
Kaine took his time. If he’d had his way, he would have turned the bike around and headed anywhere but Prentiss House. Anywhere but the place Danny died, the place where his body cooled in death. But the living needed him. Kaine had to bury the loss and fight the pain, at least for a while.
Marian Prentiss had lost someone that day, too. She’d lost her husband, the father of her unborn child. She’d spent much of the previous hour hiding under a mattress in fear for her life. She’d been listening to a gunfight and an explosion that, to her, would have meant the loss of her farm, too. Her home.
What must she be feeling with her ho
me a battleground, the blood of half a dozen corpses staining her land and her house, and with no one but two total strangers dressed in military uniform for company?
And three survivors.
Kaine couldn’t forget the three surviving combatants. The one-handed Merc, the poached Commando, and the remaining half-brother, Lajos Pataki. The half-brother … yes, the half-brother.
The broken bones of a plan, which had started to form when he’d first arrived at Prentiss House started knitting together. A plan that satisfied his desire to avenge both Danny’s death and the cold-blooded murder of Robert Prentiss. A plan that relied on Lajos Pataki’s continued survival and his eventual return, alive, to his Papa—assuming he survived the journey home.
Kaine plotted vengeance. Hot vengeance! Sod that nonsense about retribution being a dish best served cold.
Damn them. Damn them all to Hell!
He ground his teeth and opened the Tiger’s throttle.
Concerns for keeping Lajos alive drew his thoughts to Lara. The medically trained Lara, who, despite everyone’s concerns, was racing towards a battlefield in the heart of rural England. Racing towards death and destruction.
Jesus, what a Godawful mess.
He’d lost men before. Good men who’d died in battle, fighting for Queen and Country—whatever that meant. But this was different. Danny had placed himself in danger to protect a woman and her unborn child, and he’d done so voluntarily. As Kaine raced the growling Triumph through the quiet, leafy lanes of the English countryside, everything seemed so bloody unreal. This wasn’t some dust-blown, fly-encrusted Middle Eastern desert, or a mountain range in the Hindu Kush, but a rain-washed rural valley in the East Midlands, for Christ’s sake.
Such a terrible, Goddamned waste.
And Bobbie. How the hell was he going to tell Bobbie? Hadn’t she suffered enough after the treatment Pony Tedesco dished out to her mother? Poor Bobbie. Lara would want to accompany him to deliver the news, but it was his job, not hers. Danny was one of his men. Delivering the news was Kaine’s responsibility.
On the Hunt Page 17
